Reasons
To Be Mad
You couldn't miss the thunk when the school budget went down,
and nobody mistook it for anything it wasn't. A lot of people
are really pissed off. They're pissed off in Olive because
the school board's likely to vote for the large parcel bill
in August, raising school taxes 50 percent or more. That's
a good reason to be pissed. They're pissed, not quite as much
in Shandaken and Woodstock, because the board didn't do that
last year, and it cost most people several hundred dollars
they wouldn't have had to pay. That's a good reason too. They're
pissed in West Hurley over the school closing, and who wouldn't
be?
People vote their anger because they can and they should,
but mostly because they can. In our society school district
budgets are the one and only place where you can go to the
polls and say no, I'm not willing to pay it. That doesn't
work with town, county or state government, and it doesn't
work with the federal budget or at the gas station.
But it does work with school systems and when it does, we
all understand nobody really wins or at least wins anything
they really want.
We're not going to try and insist that good schools are a
fair deal, or that they more than pay for themselves over
the lifetime of our kids and with enhanced property values.
We think both are true, but we don't expect anyone who doesn't
already understand why that is, to be open to hearing it coming
from us, or from anyone. We're not prattleheaded enough to
believe that either money alone buys quality education, or
that it doesn't help meaningfully, because it does. If it
didn't, people would wonder why districts that spend a ton
of money also tend to have very high test scores and outstanding
college placement histories.
We should though, agree to step back far enough to get the
whole of the picture in the frame, and to call things by their
right name. We have to start with the fact that the entire
system, the whole mechanism by which we fund public education
is totally screwed up. We are the only country in the world
that funds basic education on the basis of local property
taxes. Few people would even bother to try and argue there's
anything remotely fair or equitable about it. Wealthy communities
and wealthy kids benefit, less wealthy communities have to
make do with less, everyone knows there's a huge disparity
in the quality of education around the state and the whole
thing stinks. So why does it go on? Well in New York State
it's a reflection of the shift in population and political
power from the cities to the suburbs, with rural areas like
ours basically swept aside in the shuffle. In terms of funding,
we're pretty much in the same boat as city school districts
are, and this has been going on and getting worse for two
generations now. But it's not going to stay that way forever.
Because statewide, it's city schools that have borne most
of this inequity. And people there are pissed enough about
it that it's finally moved to the courts of New York State.
We believe that change and something far closer to an equitable
system of funding education statewide is coming. But until
it does, we're going to have to keep muddling through.
Onteora is a good school district, and our current trustees
have, by and large, done a good job of focusing on education,
as they said they would. The budget the voters rejected was
one we thought worthy of support, though we understand why
the support's not there. We also understand there's a limit
to what the district's taxpayers can be expected to bear,
and we're functioning close enough to that limit that very
tight fiscal management is called for. We don't know if a
harder look at expenses could have kept the West Hurley school
open; possibly it could have. But we don't think that would
have made much difference in whether the budget passed or
not, because the large parcel bill has created an adversarial
dynamic between our communities that's as unreasonable as
it is artificial.
Putting aside for a moment the historical injustice of what
the reservoir did to Olive and its tax base, for Olive's current
taxpayers - and for all the taxpayers of the district-
a fair assessment of the Ashokan Reservoir would have had
the district receiving a fair level of payment, in total,
all along. The current assessment of the reservoir is of course,
ridiculously low. But equally ridiculous is that it's
NOT the City at this moment that's fighting to maintain this.
Oh they've been jerks, imperious jerks, on the whole subject
of paying fairly for years, but right now the City's not the
problem. Because they've said they won't contest a reservoir
reval by the state Office of Real Property Services, and it's
ORPS that's refusing to deal fairly with Olive or with Onteora
on this matter. This isn't some bureaucratic screw-up or oversight,
this is the implementation of policy and we believe it comes
straight from the Governor's office. Why Governor Pataki's
doing this we have no idea, but it does seem part of a pattern
that suggests there's just not enough votes or soft money
in the Catskills to worry much about anything that happens
here. So if you want to be pissed at the City for its historical
position, there's good reason for that. But if you're pissed
over the impact of the large parcel bill, and how it's now
likely to hurt our kids by forcing a contingency budget on
us amongst the other things it's doing, you may want to direct
any thoughts you might have to the governor, who could fix
it with a phone call, instead of our school trustees who can't.
We agree that school taxes should be assessed fairly amongst
all the district's towns. But until Olive's contribution -
especially the city's half - is valued and taxed for what
it's worth, the injustice of that will yield us nothing but
the antagonism it's created and that no administrator or trustee
at Onteora deserves to be faulted for. Take issue with line
items in a budget or with individual discretionary increases?
Sure. Insisting those are the real problem here, that we can't
buy.
